Tim May writes:

At 5:33 AM -0700 8/25/97, Peter Trei wrote:

...

Several years ago I came up with a little variation on the Welfare Mother problem which I thought was a lot more palatable.

...

Offer a 'birthday present' program, under which *any* female over the age of 11 who has not yet had a child or become pregnant, on her birthday, gets a cash award. The award should be high enough to encourage participation; $250 seems about right. A woman who can deliberatly turn down a $250 lump sum every year for the rest of her life is almost certainly able to afford to raise a child.

Possibly more palatable to the majority not already on welfare, but hardly an incentive to a single mother contemplating the increase in her AFDC/WIC/etc. benefits should she add to her brood.

You are not thinking this through. Under this scheme, every welfare mother would march her girls down to the clinic and get them Norplanted as soon as she could. Those girls would not be able to further add to the welfare rolls until they reach legal age, and could have the contraceptive removed without their mother's permission. By then they'd have developed a habit of contraception, which would likely continue. [...]

But given the obvious flaws in Peter's plan, he probably has a future as a bureaucrat in Washington. :-)

Tim: Your keyboard is on, but the processor socket is empty....

--Tim May

Peter Trei